And totally true. I remember it well.

He looked the the true alternative in the Democratic Party and thought he was going to get the nomination. Didn't think Clinton had a chance, especially against a President running for his second term. Then he was President.

No reason Bernie couldn't do the same. No reason at all.

He did January 1997. That would have been the end of his first term. Presumably, he was not in good health until the day he died.

I think Bernie is our next President. He talks in plain language that all of us can understand and do appreciate. He not only uses words we like to hear but he has been walking his talk for years. He has a grandfatherly persona. He's honest as the day is long and can look you right in the eyes when he talks to you. What is there to not like about Bernie?

Bernie Sanders is the real deal and exactly what America needs today. I believe that with all my heart.

follow the money is an old saying but true.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Tsongas




I liked Paul, but the message he was touting was what slowed his roll.

Seems like he will have to break the equation Money = Votes if he is going to win.

He's doing OK on message, so he differs from Tsongas in that regard. Tsongas was not on point with his economic message at ALL--the fact that Romney backed him was telling.

To close the cash gap, he's not going to do it with individual donations...He's just not, and that's not a slam, it's simple fact. He's going to have to do a little tacking, perhaps and adopt an issue that some deep-pocketed individual --who can, with a few pals, create a PAC and dump billions into it-- holds near and dear. Don't ask me to pick what issue...I simply can't. I don't know what he'd be willing to do for a vital infusion of cash, and I've no wish to be accused of denigrating him by making a suggestion his first-tier supporters find unworthy.

If he could con some libertarians into giving him "spoiler" money, he could conceivably grab the ball and run it up the middle. If he got the votes to somehow win the primary, he could then ask a lot of the Big Money liberals and the traditional Dem sources --who might have to jink leftward in their thought processes-- for cash for the general election effort.

Would they give it, though?? Maybe, but then again, maybe not. They might just say 'screw it' and put all their money and effort into a Dem legislative super-majority, let 2016 go, and look towards 2020 (and a new, young, fresh-faced candidate) for an executive branch win. You don't need the Executive branch if you've got Congress sewn up. And politics is as much about individuals and personalities as it is about issues. People who are emotionally invested in one candidate, especially when that investment goes back years, even decades, don't always transfer their loyalties so easily. They just might prefer the role of championing a vigorous and occasionally victorious super-opposition to seeing the candidate they preferred thwarted yet again. But who knows at this point in time? There's many a slip twixt the cup and the lip!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/04/02/hillary-clinton-barack-ob_n_94770.html

Karl Rove, Bush strategist, also forecast Obama losing against a McCain-Palin ticket:

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2008/09/rove_obama_cant_win_against_pa.html

Many others agreed he couldn't win. Daily Kos recounts some of them here:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/11/05/652796/-Obama-Can-t-Win-Worst-Predictions-of-2008

<snip>

* Rush Limbaugh ("Obama will lose big&quot

* Alex Castellanos, Republican strategist and CNN commentator

* Shelby Steele, author and research fellow at the Hoover Institution, on NPR

* Ed Koch, Former NYS Mayor and failed gubernatorial candidate

* Tom Hayden, activist

* Steve Mitchell, head of Mitchell Research.

* Hillary Clinton, trying to earn Bill Richardson's endorsement

* Jacob Weisberg of Slate hedged his bets, saying if Obama lost, it would be because of racism

<snip>

* In March 2006, the New York Times assured us that Hillary Clinton was locking up most of the major Democratic fundraisers "to make it harder for potential rivals to compete in 2008," thus deterring others from entering the race. LINK Yet Barack Obama went around the fundraising establishment, raising more than $700 million, most of it from small donors on the internet.

* As early as May 2006, CBS News and others had already anointed Clinton the "frontrunner" for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination. LINK

<snip>

* Newsweek and others fretted that Obama would have trouble wooing Latino voters, given supposed historic animosities with African-American, compounded by Republican inroads among Latinos made by Bush. The "black-brown divide," we were told, would sink Obama, since "tensions in this country between blacks and Latinos are alive and well." LINK By the end of the race, Obama was favored by 81% of Latino voters.


Oh and back in the '60s? We were told that Americans would never elect a Catholic. Then Kennedy won.

I recall primaries where nobody thought Howard Dean or John Edwards would pull many voters, but they did. Edwards, an anti-corporate lawyer battling the corporations, might have won if not for his sexual scandal. Dean might've won and brought us true universal healthcare -- his big issue as a Dr. and ex-Gov. of Vermont -- if not for the media hyping the "Dean scream" to make him sound hysterical when in fact he was shouting to be heard over a loud crowd, only the media cut out the crowd sound to discredit Dean, the progressive in his race.

(Moral of the story: don't believe any of the "experts." The monied interest that owns most of the media has a vested interest in convincing people that no candidate outside the moderate to progressive white male framework can win. They can, and they have...except for the gender barrier that has not yet been broken but will, when the right female candidate comes along if Hilary isn't it.

or I'm the better option of going up against tough candidate McCain and playing up her foreign policy "experience" (which the more "experience" the more negative my opinion) as something where she will stand against McCain and playing up the importance of not losing to the Republicans. Then Obama had increase in turnout from the non-voter vote.

the 2008 primary.

I had no idea who he was talking about!!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Cabot_Lodge_Jr.

That's how Tsongas said "George."

On a message board, "Jodge" looks a lot more like "Lodge" than it does "George." And, just my luck, Lodge seemed to make sense in connection with Tsongas.

I

Florida City after Hurricane Andrew before President Bush did. He also got out of his motorcade and talked to some people who had just lost everything they had. I got to talk to him for a minute and shook his hand. When President Bush finally showed up, he just zipped through in his motorcade, barely slowed down, and didn't talk to anyone. I really liked Bill Clinton. He disappointed me with his "but I didn't inhale" bullshit, but I liked when he showed up on The Arsenio Hall Show and played his Saxaphone. Very cool!

Peace,

Ghost

That's what made it so funny, imo, plus the fact that he 'played' so many tunes. Bill was a natural at comedy, in the same endearing way as Peyton Manning -- both are smooth under pressure.

I get your point, but the 1992 Presidential election is a one of a kind in modern times.

....H. Ross Perot (I), Andre Verne Marrou (Libertarian) plus another so-called "third" Party on the right got about 19.25% of the vote, with most of that going to Perot. Bush got 37.45%. If Perot had not made history in terms of a "third" party in modern times performing well, Bush would have won the 1992 Presidential quite handily. With Perot's challenge, Clinton won with only a 43.01% plurality of the popular vote.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1992


1992 freaked Republican voters and 2000 freaked Democrats. Anything is possible, but I personally very much doubt we will be seeing a third party candidate make as much difference as did Perot for a long time.

caveat: I have looked at a state by state breakdown to see how many electoral votes, if any, Perot cost Bush. Perot got no electoral votes himself, but he may have gotten enough votes in some states to toss the electoral to Bubba, ala Nader in Florida in 2000. No doubt such an analysis is online somewhere.

But that is only to say that 1992 is not the basis for comparison for 2016. My comments have nothing at all to do with whether Bernie can win the 2016 general or not. Obviously, I am not dismissing Bernie.

it was a wasted vote.

it was over 50% if the "wasted voters" did vote for him but I don't know how that translates to the electoral college. 2000 was the year the third party got the smallest percentage of the vote in a long time, if not ever -- its been the same since but as far as Clinton I think it had more to do with his likable, charming personality than politics. Voters are incredibly swayed by the current state of the economy no matter what the reasons for the cause, Jimmy Carter took the hits that transpired by the time they got there and the rebound hit when Reagan showed up and left just in time for the Bush recession.

.... "they" often turn out to be pretty stupid.

Maybe this will open some eyes.

EOM

And Democrats would have been in the wilderness longer as a party, but maybe would have avoided the trap of winning by 'triangulation' and falling prey to the belief that the only way to win is to elect people who are already halfway Republican.

That said, I'll still support Sanders right now but will vote for the Democratic nominee. And I'll continue to speak out against the sexist, ageist attacks on Ms. Clinton by anyone from any political persuasion. There's plenty to disagree with w/r/t her corporatist policies.

Stranger things have happened than Sanders' election. These are precarious times.

Sanders is actually aligned with the majority positions of Americans--it's just that many have been brainwashed by decades of corporatized (with zealous RW Christian help) mainstream media messages that demonize social democracy and also associate social justice movements with "the feminine."

So a majority of working class white males in particular disidentify with what are in effect the better practices of Scandinavian democracies, because they think they're voting for their own destruction (however irrational that appears here). They may be persuaded to come around.

Perot screwed himself over majorly midway through the campaign and STILL got 19% of the vote. If he'd had better handlers, he would have skated past Clinton.

Without that, we might have been looking at President Perot that term.